The financial costs of healthcare costs, or, is keeping me alive worth it?
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Re: The financial costs of healthcare costs, or, is keeping me alive worth it?
#2A much deeper & wider-ranging article that I'd assumed from the title.
Though I don't see anything on whether "the cost of keeping me alive" should include a "...under America's dysfunction and greed-centric health care system" clause.
Re: The financial costs of healthcare costs, or, is keeping me alive worth it?
#3That bit about Golden Rice is a crock.
I'm not saying it couldn't play a positive role or that I think it is dangerous, but there are (1) many ways to get Vitamin A, (2) many problems in global nutrition other than Vitamin A. Trying to picture the developers like Prometheus getting their liver torn out every day just isn't helpful. The fact that they got 100 Nobel Prize winners to sign their petition is bunk because very few of them know about agronomy or the problems of marketing technology in the developing world.
Specifically: Golden Rice has to compete in terms of all the agronomic and gastronomic variables that matter to farmers and consumers. They aren't going to put up with worse yield, drought tolerance, etc. just for this one trait. The first version of Golden Rice didn't have a lot of Vitamin A, though the second version does.
There have been efforts across the last 50 years or so to get people in rural areas to switch to better cookstoves that are a great case study in just how hard it can be to get people in the developing world to adopt something new. It can be done, but Greenpeace is the least of the obstacles that they face.
Re: The financial costs of healthcare costs, or, is keeping me alive worth it?
#4I recommend anyone who is interested in this area read "Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End" by Atul Gawande. Not just for the financial aspects, but an overall deconstruction of the broken end-of-life care system in the country. By making "extend one's life for a few days/weeks by any means necessary" as the gold standard for good medical care, we have lost sight of what healthcare should actually be about. Choice, dignity, comfort are all thrown out of the window in favor of metrics and profit.
Re: The financial costs of healthcare costs, or, is keeping me alive worth it?
#5A much deeper & wider-ranging article that I'd assumed from the title. Though I don't see anything on whether "the cost of keeping me alive" should include a "...under America's dysfunction and greed-centric health care system" clause.
It seems people are disagreeing with you, maybe because your statement is short and seen as political. However, you do have a valid point. Even in socially funded systems there has to be a cutoff on what care will be funded and what will not based on the views of society and the potential costs vs benefits (including probability of sucess).
A very interesting example on how social views influence healthcare decisions and costs can actually be seen in the US system via the Amish communities, the church health funding, and their views on medical interventions.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/20/the-amish-health-care-...
Re: The financial costs of healthcare costs, or, is keeping me alive worth it?
#6A much deeper & wider-ranging article that I'd assumed from the title. Though I don't see anything on whether "the cost of keeping me alive" should include a "...under America's dysfunction and greed-centric health care system" clause.
It seems people are disagreeing with you, maybe because your statement is short and seen as political. However, you do have a valid point. Even in socially funded systems there has to be a cutoff on what care will be funded and what will not based on the views of society and the potential costs vs benefits (including probability of sucess). A very interesting example on how social views influence healthcare decisions…
Actually, I was thinking more of "$X per month to keep me alive in the US" vs. "$X/4 per month to keep me alive in $Medical_Tourism_Destination"...would that change the answer to "is it worth it?". (In some cases, for some people, & other obvious caveats.)
Re: The financial costs of healthcare costs, or, is keeping me alive worth it?
#7"The future, which distinctly though barely missing, is going to be brighter than the present."
This one hit pretty hard. I am not a cancer patient who is missing a life saving treatment by 10 years, but it does feel like we are living in a sort of liminal space between religion and technology. Sure we have iphones and Netflix but we all still work 40-50 hour weeks. ChatGPT seems nifty but if I break my arm they will just throw a cast on it and tell me to wait it out.
Re: The financial costs of healthcare costs, or, is keeping me alive worth it?
#8A much deeper & wider-ranging article that I'd assumed from the title. Though I don't see anything on whether "the cost of keeping me alive" should include a "...under America's dysfunction and greed-centric health care system" clause.
Right. This issue is mixed up with whether keeping the health insurance industry alive is worth the cost.
Re: The financial costs of healthcare costs, or, is keeping me alive worth it?
#9That bit about Golden Rice is a crock. I'm not saying it couldn't play a positive role or that I think it is dangerous, but there are (1) many ways to get Vitamin A, (2) many problems in global nutrition other than Vitamin A. Trying to picture the developers like Prometheus getting their liver torn out every day just isn't helpful. The fact that they got 100 Nobel Prize winners to sign their petition is bunk because…
The thing that I haven't been able to really understand, is why aren't these areas able to grow other vitamin A rich crops? The climate and environment is usually fine for growing something - yams, mangos, cantaloupe, carrots, etc. I can see that sometimes it's a cost thing as those sell for higher prices or are more expensive to preserve than rice. But it seems that farmers stick with regular rice because that's what they know and are set up to do. Maybe switching to golden rice is easier since the fields are the same, but things like yield and such could be a barrier. Maybe it would be better to create a program train/pay for additonal farms or conversion of existing farms into other vitamin A rich crops. Increasing supply could reduce the price and make it more affordable. Or is it partially an education thing, where consumers don't know they're deficient? Maybe we need more education there. In any case, it's seems very complex, beyond just the rice.
Re: The financial costs of healthcare costs, or, is keeping me alive worth it?
#10A much deeper & wider-ranging article that I'd assumed from the title. Though I don't see anything on whether "the cost of keeping me alive" should include a "...under America's dysfunction and greed-centric health care system" clause.
If that's what you got from the article you clearly missed the most important point.